outside of aerospace and defense, I haven’t
seen another industry with formalized
associations with that sole focus. My
experience in the financial services industry
has proven the opposite—most companies
hold details of their programs very close.

There is always strength in numbers, and I’d
encourage practitioners
to build networks
with their same-industry peers.

AT: Now, I hope you
don’t mind me going
back even further in
time to the 10 years
you spent working for
Integrity Interactive,
which provided online
compliance training to
a lot of companies. What’s remarkable to me
is how much renewed interest there is these
days in making training more effective.

From your time at Integrity Interactive
and since, what do you think makes for
effective training?

ML: Training is a core aspect of
compliance and ethics programs and a
specific element of an effective compliance
and ethics program under the Sentencing
Guidelines. We can talk a lot about what
makes an effective compliance program and
cite examples. For training to be effective,
I think it must be (1) relevant, (2) engaging,
and ( 3) actionable.

Relevant. We are all grown-ups in the
working world (or we should be). To be
effective at our jobs, we focus on those
activities that address our strategic objective.

Everything else is noise. The same is truefor all training. To my earlier commentabout us all working as sales/marketingprofessionals, we have a finite amount oftime to sell the idea of compliance andethics to our employees. If you hit themwith training and it’s not relevant, you’velost them. And you’ll never get them back ifyou later do provide something of relevance.

They’ve already tuned out.

Engaging. Again, putting on ourmarketing hat, you need to understandthe needs of eachdifferent employeetype and deliversomething theycan digest. Don’tprovide an hour’sworth of training ifyou can accomplishit in 20 minutes.

Mix the media
presentation. Use
videos. Use cartoons.

Be memorable. Fifty
PowerPoint slides does not cut it anymore—
really, it never did.

Actionable.What do you want your
employees to do with this knowledge? How
should they apply it to their daily work life?

As compliance and ethics professionals,
we need to connect the dots for employees
so they can put their new knowledge
to practice.

AT: One issue that’s been hot of late is
whether it’s better to have long-form training
modules or it’s better to have lots of shorter
pieces. Sort of split the hour up into a dozen
short sessions. What’s your take? Do you
think that’s workable and likely to have
greater impact?

ML: I am a huge proponent of smaller,
targeted messaging spread over time. When
companies tell employees in January to
take six courses, for example, the employees
tend to do one of two things: put off the
training for another time or quickly cram in
all the training to check the box and move